Consumers have an ever-increasing array of options for consuming media content, in terms of the types of media content (e.g., video, audio, etc.), providers of the media content, and devices for consuming the media content. Media content providers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and effective at providing media content quickly and reliably to consumers. Success in the marketplace will depend in part on the ability of media content providers to effectively provide media content to a wide range of devices used by consumers.
Different devices and/or software may request the same media content using different protocols. The requests are received by an edge server of a content distribution network (CDN) which, if it does not have the requested fragments in its cache, retrieves them from an origin server and then caches the fragments for servicing of subsequent requests. Unfortunately, because client requests in different protocols have distinct formatting, the CDN does not recognize when the requests correspond to the same content, resulting in redundant caching.